'Last Jedi' gets thumbs up from 89% of viewers, says new poll

Get ready for a shock, internet veterans: the folks loudly complaining about the latest Star Wars movie represent a tiny vocal minority.

That's according to a data from SurveyMonkey, revealed here exclusively to Mashable. An audience poll of 4,441 U.S. adults found that of people who've seen Star Wars: The Last Jedi, a whopping 89 percent either loved or liked it. (Loves and likes were evenly divided.)

Interestingly, the 89 percent figure stays the same whether respondents described themselves as a "big" Star Wars fan or a regular fan. Even among self-described non-Star Wars fans -- whom, one presumes, must have wandered into the wrong theater -- 81 percent loved or liked The Last Jedi.

Only 34 percent of casual fans said they "loved" rather than "liked" the movie, but 63 percent of hardcore fans declared their love. Which suggests that even among the Star Wars cognoscenti -- the kind of people who spent years coming up with theories about Rey or Supreme Leader Snoke only to see them squashed -- the movie has outsized appeal.

The survey was conducted December 15 to 19, the first four days of The Last Jedi's release. Given that many fans have their opinion of a shocking, action-packed movie improved by subsequent viewings, we might expect the number to actually inch up over time.

The notion of a Star Wars audience divided came largely from Rotten Tomatoes. The website currently gives The Last Jedi a 93 percent fresh rating among critics, but a 54 percent rotten rating among audience members' votes.

(According to The Huffington Post, one fan has just owned up to flooding Rotten Tomatoes with bot votes -- a droid army worthy of a Sith villain.)

Other fans were quick to point out that the Rotten Tomatoes score may have been gamed by a vocal minority of fans who were disappointed by the unusual way the Last Jedi story went. This survey is the closest thing to proof that their suspicion is accurate.

The generally positive reaction doesn't mean that fans are exactly on the same page as critics, however. For example, we rated The Last Jedi as the third best Star Wars movie thus far; self-described Star Wars superfans are a little more conservative, ranking it fourth behind the three movies of the original trilogy.

Still, only 13 percent of all respondents said The Last Jedi was "below average" or "the single worst" Star Wars movie. This despite the fact that only a quarter of all Star Wars fans say the sequel trilogy is their favorite trilogy thus far -- roughly the same percentage that put the prequels first.

Respondents were also asked to rank the various movie or TV franchises set in outer space. Star Wars was the top choice of 33 percent of the entire poll, suggesting it is more than twice as popular as Star Trek (the first choice of 12 percent).

Guardians of the Galaxy, Doctor Who and Firefly were the only other franchises to crack the 1 percent popularity threshold. When it comes to space fiction fandom, the galaxy far far away and the final frontier are still the only games in town.

There's further good news for Disney and Lucasfilm. A clear majority (53 percent) of all respondents, non-fans included, said the companies should make more Star Wars movies, while just a third said they should quit.

And the most popular Star Wars character among fans? Step forward Han Solo -- whose young life just happens to be the subject of the next Star Wars film, Solo, releasing on May 25, 2018.